Week12
WEEK 12: atonal light synthesizer thing#
tldr: atonal light synthesizer thingy using MaxMSP as interface for phototransistor data:
Atonal light synthesizer video
Writing an application that interfaces a user with an input &/or output device! I kept things brief this week as I was busy with final project stuff BUT I wanted to work on getting sensor data into a musical programming language like MaxMSP for use in silly musical shenanigans.
My basic idea was to make a little “light theremin” that changes pitch depending on the ambient light conditions.
I started by designing some wacky boards (playing with Fusion’s outline spline feature yay!) and milling two, just in case I wanted to control two different parameters.
It worked great, and this was the smallest board I think I’ve made so far which is fun and exciting. I am really getting better at soldering, because this went pretty easy and could register changes in light no problem:
Brief Diatrade on How Phototransistors Work#
I spent a little time learning about phototransistors since I knew very little going into this week. Basically, they’re just like regular normie transistors except the thing controlling whether or not current flows is not an electrical signal but rather light! With an analog pin, you can measure the voltage induced by this and extrapolate the light level (is my rough understanding).
Next came figuring out how to get that sensor data into MaxMSP. I asked Nina, who had done something similar for Wildcard Week, and she very kindly pointed me to her code, which used Serial, not OSC as I was expecting.
It turns out that Max has a serial object which makes this kinda thing preeety easy actually. I ran into a lot of weird bugs at first, and issues with the baud not aligning, and also problems with converting the raw ascii data into actual integers for Max, but after that I got data in no problem. Then it was just a matter of mapping it to a similar oscillator and it was ez money. It was super atonal (which I love) and a bit slow to react for some reason (which I don’t), so maybe in the future I’ll investigate snapping to a key or something.
Ok, that’s that for now - pushing on for final project wheee!!!
NOTES FOR PRGOENY#
-as the semester goes on, start catering your assignments more and more to your interests / your final project / what you want to get out of the class!